On California Secretary of State Debra Bowen's most important night of the year, her prehistoric website was handling the traffic like the 405 freeway at 5 p.m. The standard map and chart features were wiped inexplicably, then replaced by a ghetto PDF link we had to re-click whenever we thought there might be an update.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times election results were dry, ugly and impossible to find (as usual), and other SoCal news giants didn't do much better.

We hate to say it -- you know, being journalists and all -- but Twitter won the race tonight, hands down.

It's really no wonder journalism's dying: An army of amateurs had all the latest polls, gossip and results on live stream. It was like an effortless rain of election tidbits from all corners of the universe.

A real-live East Coast professor even told the Christian Science Monitor he preferred to track votes on Twitter: "It's not good journalism -- it needs to be verified -- but for those interested it provides instant, raw data you can't get from traditional outlets," he said.

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